Jaguar is calling for a new RIM CEO to replace Lazaridis and Balsillie, and wants RIM to break up into separate public companies or be put up for sale as a whole

Just last month, two proposals were suggested in regards to the sale of RIM's intellectual propoerty as well as an executive shake-up. Now, Canadian merchant bank Jaguar Financial Corp. is pushing Research In Motion (RIM) to make some hefty changes in the way of a new chief executive and putting the company up for sale as a whole or in parts -- and its ideas are gaining support.

RIM, maker of BlackBerry, is currently run by President and co-CEO Mike Lazaridis and co-CEO Jim Balsillie. The company has had a hard time keeping up with competitors like Apple, Google, Microsoft, HTC and Samsung when it comes to mobile devices and mobile operating systems because of its slow response to a constantly-changing market. Its stock hit a "52-week low" of $19.29 on October 4 after hitting a high of $70.54 in February.

For the above-mentioned reasons, Jaguar, which has acquired more shares of RIM since the stock price began to drop, is now calling for a new RIM CEO to replace Lazaridis and Balsillie. It also wants RIM to break up into separate public companies or be put up for sale as a whole.

According to Jaguar, a minimum of 8 percent of stockholders agree with its ideas and are calling for a company shake-up as well.

"Everybody is in support of a sale of RIM or another value creative transaction...like splitting the company into separate public companies -- a network company, a device company and a patents company," said Vic Alboini, Jaguar chief executive. "It's time for RIM to bring in a transformational leader and a respected independent chairman."

But Lazaridis and Balsillie will likely not take this sitting down. Between the two, Lazaridis and Balsillie hold over 10 percent of the stock and have a crucial role in the company's decision-making as chairman of the board.

Jaguar said it has spoken to 20 of the larger institutional holders so far out of 1,000 stockholders, but plans to continue speaking to more.

"We haven't adopted a call-center approach," said Alboini. "It has been very highly targeted, but now that we've got the response, you know we are going to go out and see how many more we can get."

According to Alboini, Jaguar can call a shareholders meeting with 8 percent support, which would force RIM's board to listen to its demands.

RIM saidover 90 percent of its voting shares had supported the re-election of directors that includes Lazaridis and Balsillie during the company's annual meeting in July.

In other RIM-related news, BlackBerry services continue to be disrupted in Europe, Africa, the Middle East, India, and now, North America as well. The outage is going on three days now in some areas, and could affect 70 million BlackBerry users outside of North America, according to RBC analysts Mike Abramsky and Paul Treiber.

"The messaging and browser delays...were caused by a core switch failure within RIM's infrastructure," said RIM. "As a result, a large backlog of data was generated and we are now working to clear that backlog and restore normal service."

RIM originally said the services were restored Tuesday, but have now said they are still working on the problem and haven't mentioned how long it would take.

The outage, which has now spread to North America as well, could negatively affect RIM competition-wise with the new iPhone 4S launching in only two days.

Hey you didn't notice that WebOS tablet that HP made was molasses slow, this is why consumers were not buying it. I tried it in store on the day it was released and immediately realized it was dead on arrival. Playbook experience in store was head and shoulders above. This explains why WebOS died quick and Playbook survived, albeit not excelled in sales because gazillions of Apple biased reviewers rated it down. Well, Anand was not Apple biased and it showed in his Playbook review but how many real smart reviewers like Anand do we have? None at all, very very rare.

Anyway, I can't really say that these days any of the smartphones and tablets really "stand out" as you say. They are all very similar, Apple and Android are clones of each other, now MS joined the fun and it's also kind of standing out if you wish by the original UI, but does this standing out help MS to sell a lot of WP7? Not at all. Same with RIM, their QNX may stand out like MS stand out with Metro UI, still MS sees abysmal sales and RIM may too, so standing out does not help. There are other factors besides standing out, like growing markets, customer loyalty, proper retail sales preparation, proper sales incentives and commission for the cellular stores salesmen and many other factors that affect sales. Apple for example has very powerful retail chain and because of that it does not need to stand out. Google probably pays good commission to cellular salesmen and does not have to stand out. MS can leverage maybe integration with Xbox and Windows 8 to avoid the need to stand out, and RIM may just exploit their current loyal customer base and growing market outside of the US to stay afloat without the need to stand out.

I mean if so many companies survive without standing out (that includes Apple because iPhone these days definitely does not stand out at all) I don't see why RIM can't do this. It's not like smartphone market is shrinking so there will be place for RIM too as the market grows. This reason alone I think should be enough to keep RIM alive. If they don't stand out but don't fuck up like they used to with ancient outdated OS and hardware a couple of years ago - they should be okay, not growing wild but kind of profitable enough to keep Jaguar happy. They just need time to get QNX devices out.

"We are going to continue to work with them to make sure they understand the reality of the Internet. A lot of these people don't have Ph.Ds, and they don't have a degree in computer science." -- RIM co-CEO Michael Lazaridis